Consolidating the periphery: three residential complexes in Zaragoza by Grupo Z

The rural exodus after the Spanish Civil War led to many irregular settlements on the outskirts of Spanish cities.These new neighbourhoods often lacked planning, infrastructure, public facilities and services and consisted of rural-like self-built housing, evoking the origins of the inhabitants. Later urban planning efforts often distorted the original character of these settlements by pursuing the model of commuter towns dominated by road infrastructure and large-scale residential slabs. With the transition to democracy, citizens, professionals and institutions experimented with new solutions for these peripheral settlements. In the early 1980s, Grupo Z was involved in such efforts, taking part on the interior reform of the La Paz district, building three adjacent residential complexes. Rather than embracing sweeping, universal solutions, such as those resulting from previous planning projects,the architects of Grupo Z, by designing these buildings, offered specific responses based on logic, applied to an urban context, to a particular socioeconomic reality and identity. These buildings were more respectful of the preexisting built environment and restored rural architectural values: used vernacular architectural resources such as façade fronts, courtyards, openings, roofs and materiality; interacted with the urban fabric through a fragmented volumetry; gave new life to the adjacent public space by spreading out the access points; and included very different types of housing to attract a diverse population and promote community identity with a wide variety of relational spaces. The purpose of this study is to analyse these three complexes in detail and to recognise the architectural values that have helped to consolidate the neighbourhood with respect for its original form and identity, in contrast to previous efforts that nearly transformed the peripheral district

A MATLAB program for the computation of the confluent hypergeometric function Φ2

We here present a sample MATLAB program for the numerical evaluation of the confluent hypergeometric function Φ2. This program is based on the calculation of the inverse Laplace transform using the algorithm suggested by Simon and Alouini in their reference textbook [1]

Mining of public sequencing databases supports a non-dietary origin for putative foreign miRNAs: underestimated effects of contamination in NGS

The report that exogenous plant miRNAs are able to cross the mammalian gastrointestinal tract and exert gene-regulation mechanism in mammalian tissues has yielded a lot of controversy, both in the public press and the scientific literature. Despite the initial enthusiasm, reproducibility of these results was recently questioned by several authors. To analyze the causes of this unease, we searched for diet-derived miRNAs in deep-sequencing libraries performed by ourselves and others. We found variable amounts of plant miRNAs in publicly available small RNA-seq data sets of human tissues. In human spermatozoa, exogenous RNAs reached extreme, biologically meaningless levels. On the contrary, plant miRNAs were not detected in our sequencing of human sperm cells, which was performed in the absence of any known sources of plant contamination. We designed an experiment to show that cross-contamination during library preparation is a source of exogenous RNAs. These contamination-derived exogenous sequences even resisted oxidation with sodium periodate. To test the assumption that diet-derived miRNAs were actually contamination-derived, we sought in the literature for previous sequencing reports performed by the same group which reported the initial finding. We analyzed the spectra of plant miRNAs in a small RNA sequencing study performed in amphioxus by this group in 2009 and we found a very strong correlation with the plant miRNAs which they later reported in human sera. Even though contamination with exogenous sequences may be easy to detect, cross-contamination between samples from the same organism can go completely unnoticed, possibly affecting conclusions derived from NGS transcriptomics

A Tractable Line-of-Sight Product Channel Model: Application to Wireless Powered Communications

We here present a general and tractable fading model for line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios, which is based on the product of two independent and non-identically distributed κ- μ shadowed random variables. Simple closed-form expressions for the probability density function and cumulative distribution function are derived, which are as tractable as the corresponding expressions derived from a product of Nakagami-m random variables. This newly proposed model simplifies the challenging characterization of LOS product channels, as well as combinations of LOS channels with non-LOS ones. Results are used to analyze performance measures of interest in the context of wireless powered communications.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

De la devoción al coleccionismo. Las reliquias, mediadoras entre el poder y la identidad

Bajo el título De la devoción al coleccionismo. Las reliquias, mediadoras entre el poder y la identidad, el presente volumen recoge los textos presentados en las “IV Jornadas Internacionales. El culto a las reliquias, interpretación, difusión y ritos”, celebradas en el Aula Magna de la Facultad de Derecho de nuestra Universidad durante los días 6 y 7 de abril de 2021. Los organizadores agradecen el esfuerzo y el interés que, una vez más, todos los ponentes han mostrado en la consecución de un proyecto que trata de aunar el trabajo de profesores consagrados, investigadores predoctorales y estudiantes de Grado para desarrollar nuevas investigaciones en relación al fenómeno cultural de las reliquias a lo largo de la historia. Como el lector podrá comprobar a partir de aquí, los estudios que se presentan en las páginas que siguen analizarán cuestiones muy diversas del tema que toca, abordando para ello cuestiones tocantes a las diferentes épocas históricas (desde la Antigüedad a la Edad Contemporánea) y refiriéndose a su vez a latitudes de lo más variado (no solamente al occidente europeo, sino también a diversas partes del continente asiático, de África y de América). Esperamos que, en esta cuarta edición dedicada al culto a las reliquias, puedan extraerse conclusiones valiosas capaces de acercarnos a cuestiones sobre las cuales la historiografía actual está prestando especial interés: los usos políticos de las devociones; el influjo del poder sobre las masas populares; o la importancia del coleccionismo como forma de representación social y como elemento identitario

Targeting the Mild-Hypoxia Driving Force for Metabolic and Muscle Transcriptional Reprogramming of Gilthead Sea Bream (Sparus aurata) Juveniles

Reduced oxygen availability generates a number of adaptive features across all the animal kingdom, and the goal of this study was targeting the mild-hypoxia driving force for metabolic and muscle transcriptional reprogramming of gilthead sea bream juveniles. Attention was focused on blood metabolic and muscle transcriptomic landmarks before and after exhaustive exercise. Our results after mild-hypoxia conditioning highlighted an increased contribution of lipid metabolism to whole energy supply to preserve the aerobic energy production, a better swimming performance regardless of changes in feed intake, as well as reduced protein turnover and improved anaerobic fitness with the restoration of normoxia. On-growing juveniles of gilthead sea bream were acclimated for 45 days to mild-hypoxia (M-HYP, 40-60% O-2 saturation), whereas normoxic fish (85-90% O-2 saturation) constituted two different groups, depending on if they were fed to visual satiety (control fish) or pair-fed to M-HYP fish. Following the hypoxia conditioning period, all fish were maintained in normoxia and continued to be fed until visual satiation for 3 weeks. The time course of hypoxia-induced changes was assessed by changes in blood metabolic landmarks and muscle transcriptomics before and after exhaustive exercise in a swim tunnel respirometer. In M-HYP fish, our results highlighted a higher contribution of aerobic metabolism to whole energy supply, shifting towards a higher anaerobic fitness following normoxia restoration. Despite these changes in substrate preference, M-HYP fish shared a persistent improvement in swimming performance with a higher critical speed at exercise exhaustion. The machinery of muscle contraction and protein synthesis and breakdown was also largely altered by mild-hypoxia conditioning, contributing this metabolic re-adjustment to the positive regulation of locomotion and to the catch-up growth response during the normoxia recovery period. Altogether, these results reinforce the presence of large phenotypic plasticity in gilthead sea bream, and highlights mild-hypoxia as a promising prophylactic measure to prepare these fish for predictable stressful events.This work was financially supported by a grant from the European Commission of the European Union under the Horizon 2020 research infrastructure project AQUAEXCEL2020 (652831) to J.P-S. Additional funding was obtained by a Spanish MICINN project (Bream-AquaINTECH, RTI2018-094128-B-I00). J.A.M.-S. received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Juan de la Cierva-Formacion, Reference FJCI-2014-20,161)